censorship

This is a picture of an Easter Simnel cake, a cake that sounds delicious and is very common in the UK around this time of year. They usually look about like this one but Instagram found it just too risque and suspended the account of the woman who posted it.

Her daughter brought this to wider attention on social media after Instagram refused to restore the account saying that, "We understand that people have different ideas about what’s okay to share on Instagram, but to keep Instagram safe, we require everyone to follow our guidelines." according to Mashable.

In the UK, it's required to screen all films (that you plan on showing to the public) through the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). It's expensive, costing over £100 to submit and another £7 per minute of screening. It also opens your film up to censorship. In protest of the amount of control and censorship the BBFC imposes on the UK film industry, filmmaker Charlie Lyne created a video of paint drying to send to the BBFC.

His Kickstarter managed to fund a little over 10 hours of screening time that the BBFC will now have to watch and rate. Here is a clip of what they will be watching:

Pablo Picasso’s “Women of Algiers (Version O)” was making headlines this week when it sold at Christie’s for a whopping $179 million, making it the most expensive painting ever purchased at an auction.

Fox5 in New York also reported on the news, and one of their producers decided to blur out all the b00bs in the image, infuriating many people online.

Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine, pointed out the unnecessary censorship on Twitter Wednesday.

And others also criticized the station for bizarre editorial decision.

The hosts of Fox 5’s morning show “Good Day New York” did a segment on the controversy Thursday, in which they showed the uncensored piece, calling themselves “art connoisseurs” and blasting their coworkers who made the unfortunate decision.

In this video from a Sky News segment Wednesday, former Charlie Hebdo contributor Caroline Fourest expresses her outrage at such news organizations and begins to hold up a copy of the magazine.

“I am very sad that journalists in the UK do not support us, that journalists in the UK betray what journalism is about by thinking that people are not grown-up enough to decide whether a drawing is offensive or not,” she said.

But she isn’t able to finish her thought, as the cameras immediately cut back to the anchor, Dharshini David.

“I do apologize for any of our viewers who may have been offended,” she says.

Starting today, Russian authorities can blacklist and shut down access to websites containing alleged child pornography, as well as extremist, drug-related or otherwise illegal content without a due process. Since its passage in mid-July, the legislation has faced many criticisms for its open-ended implications and a concerted opposition from a coalition of Russian websites.

Apparently, the reason that Hanauer's talk wasn't posted to the TED website wasn't because -- as the speaker himself posited -- "[my] arguments threaten an economic orthodoxy and political structure that many powerful people have a huge stake in defending." It's because it just wasn't good enough.

Anderson:

[The censorship] story [is] so misleading [that] it would be funny […] except it successfully launched an aggressive online campaign against us. [...] [It's actually] a non-story about a talk not being chosen, because we believed we had better ones, [that] somehow got turned into a scandal about censorship. Which is like saying that if I call the New York Times and they turn down my request to publish an op-ed by me, they're censoring me.

Ouch.

Despite not making it to the TED site, Hanauer's talk is now online (and, judging by the audience reaction, it was actually quite well received).